This serves as a good reminder that we are in a world war. Western political leaders don’t want to admit that the war exists, but the 200,000 residents of the Philippine city of Marawi know all too well about the war.

The Islamic State seized control of their city more than two weeks ago and this video illustrates the degree to which the Philippine military is going to battle against the Jihadists in their country…

It seems to us that our grandfathers did not liberate the Philippines from Japanese imperialism from 1944 to 1945 only to have Jihadists seize control and impose their barbaric way of life on the good and brave people of the Philippines.

They have become very adept at conducting information operations, to the point that some experts have determined that they have information dominance over the West, and America’s bureaucratized countertterror apparatus in particular.

One of their key weapons in the information battle space is a term that has gained currency with the Left and the media in the West: Islamophobia.

Before we begin our commentary on the subject of Islamophobia, we must draw your attention to an excellent video on the subject just posted by the indispensable Robert Spencer of http://www.jihadwatch.com:

Spencer covers the history and use of the term Islamophobia with brevity and authority.

We’d like to focus a little more on the organization that hatched this misleading and outright damaging term.

Islamophobia was coined by the International Institute for Islamic Thought (IIIT), a northern Virginia-based Muslim Brotherhood think tank with a history of ties to terrorism. Here some facts about IIIT:

• IIIT was identified as a Muslim Brotherhood organization in the largest terrorism financing prosecution in US history, the US v the Holy Land Foundation.

• IIIT was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial, a prosecution in which all defendants were convicted on all counts for providing material support to Jihadist terrorists. It was the intention of the Dallas US attorney’s office to prosecute the unindicted co-conspirators in that trial, but the then-new attorney general, Eric Holder shut it down.

• IIIT was a major financial supporter–the largest donor in fact–of the Islamic Committee for Palestine, a front group for the terrorist organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The Islamic Committee for Palestine was founded by Sami al-Arian, who was convicted on terrorism charges and deported. The organization itself was shut down by the US government.

• IIIT employed Bashir Musa Nafi, one of the original founders of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Nafi was deported in 1996.

What all of this adds up to is that the term Islamophobia was invented as a weapon of Jihadist propaganda.

So, when you see a journalist, blogger, television network or politician in the West start accusing people of Islamophobia, they are in fact parroting enemy propaganda, helping the terrorists with their overall war effort.

We can now add Melbourne, Australia to the long list of Western cities victimized by jihad during the Muslim “holy” month of Ramadan.

Late yesterday afternoon, Yacqub Khayre, 29, an Australian citizen of Somali descent–who came to Australia as a child refugee at the age of 4–killed one innocent victim and took another hostage before being killed by police in a shootout and siege that lasted some 2 hours.

Khayre killed a Chinese-Australian man in the lobby of an apartment building in the affluent Brighton area of Melbourne. He then took a woman hostage in the building. Within two hours he was shot dead by police after opening fire on them.

Initial reports of the incident indicated that it was not “terrorist-related,” however those reports turned out to be inaccurate.

It turns out that Khayre called a local television station during the stand-off stating, “This is for the Islamic State, this is for Al-Qaeda.”

Subsequently, the Islamic State media arm, Amaq, claimed credit for the attack, stating,””The executor of the Melbourne attack in Australia is a soldier of the Islamic State and he carried out the attack in response to appeals to target citizens of coalition states.”

Once again, it turns out that Yacqub Khayre was known to authorities, had a long history of violence, had previously been charged with a terror offense but acquitted and was known to have connections in the past, with “violent extremists,” (which is of course a misnomer for Jihadists)

Now, in 2017, violent Jihad in the Philippines has escalated to the point that Islamic State Jihadis were able to seize a city of 200,000 for the better part of a week.

The biggest aspect of this development is the revelation that there are foreign fighters involved in the fighting in the Philippines. In fact, given the geographic distribution of the reported foreign fighters, as well as the intensity of the fighting there over the past 10 days, one has to consider that it is very possible that the Islamic State has set its sights on the Philippines as the next theater in the global Jihadist insurgency.

“Indonesians, Malaysians, Pakistanis, Saudis, Chechens, Yemenis, Indians, Moroccans, and Turks have been identified among the militants…”